The reason you won’t find The Wall Street Journal or any of its biggest competitors in either feed is that their content was shared by Facebook users more broadly across the political spectrum. The Journal removed sources that were no longer active and others, such as Twitter and YouTube, which were simply mechanisms for sharing a wide variety of content. To appear in the Journal’s blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. Using that score, they grouped the links into five categories, from “very conservative” to “very liberal.” So that site’s current content appears in the Journal’s conservative column because more than half of its links fell into the “very conservative” category during the period of the study (Jthrough January 7, 2015). The researchers also produced a list of the top 500 sources of content tracked in the study.įor a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” How did Facebook researchers calculate that? They examined the self-described political leanings of people who shared links on Facebook to calculate a political “alignment score” for each link. Analyzing these users’ political labels, the researchers categorized each as very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative or very conservative. These users had identified their political views in their own profiles on Facebook. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan Messing, Solomon Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”,, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds.įor six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.
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